These shoes are made for shocking

Japanese designer Shintaro Yamamoto is the footwear Dr Frankenstein sought by labels when they need wild shoes for the runways

- Jacob Gallagher

NEW YORK - Like the tagline of a horror movie, the shoes had teeth.

At Japanese label Doublet's fashion show in Paris in January, models tramped out in dress shoes with their toes angled upwards, like the ajar maw of a bass at feeding time. At the top and bottom of this flapping cavity were puny metallic teeth. Inside, the surface was polished tongue red.

"Monster shoes" is how Shintaro Yamamoto, the designer of these wide-mouthed wonders, described them.

The 50-year-old from Tokyo is the footwear Dr Frankenstein behind the most form-shattering, smirk-inducing dress shoes in recent memory.

In collaboration with Japanese label Comme des Garcons Homme Plus, he has made derbies with two uppers stacked on top of each other, like a double-decker bus, and combat boots with toes pointed straight up in the air at perfect 90-degree angles.

At his own label, Kids Love Gaite, he has made shoes with white skeleton bones painted on the cap and ones with an extra leather sliver sandwiched in the sole and protruding out the front, like a curled-up tongue.

"These days, I always think I don't have to be in the orthodox style," said Yamamoto, who started Kids Love Gaite in 2008. "I can think more free."

The quest for freedom has been a common motif in his life. As a teenager, his parents sent him to boarding school in the south of England. It did not suit him, so he dropped out and wandered up to London.